Red Sky at Night, page 23
“Oh, yes,” Bean said. “We know about Suzy, we know she’s staying with your mother. Echeverria is on his way at this moment to pick up your daughter, bring her down here.”
“You’re lying.”
“Oh, yes, Greta. He’s on his way as we speak. He’ll go to the door, flash his badge, tell Granny he’s come for her, come to take her to her mother.”
“Bullshit. You had no reason to abduct her. You didn’t know I’d give you any trouble.”
“Are you going to risk that?”
She steadied the pistol.
“Okay, Bean, turn around, both of you, and walk over to the door. I’m going to follow you upstairs. We’re going to go very slowly back to the upper deck, and we’re going to take this goddamn boat into Key West. If I have to kill you both, I don’t really care at this point.”
Bean moved to his medical bag.
“Not another step!” Greta shouted.
He opened the bag and took out a plastic Baggie that contained a syringe and a small vial.
“Here it is, Greta. Here’s the end of your pain. No one has to get hurt. I can give you the injection, fill your pump. You can hold on to your pistol the whole time. I don’t care. When it’s finished, you decide if you can forgive me for inconveniencing you this way. You can shoot me or you can sing my praises, whatever you think is right. I’ll take that chance.”
“Inconveniencing me? Is that what you call this?”
Tran van Hung had made several small steps toward the passageway. He was a half second from lunging to safety when Greta aimed the pistol at him and ordered him to move the hell back into the cabin. Tran hesitated a moment, staring at the barrel, then he muttered something and stepped back over to his chair.
“You’re going to be sorry for this, Bean Wilson. There’s no more money after today. After this fuckup.”
Bean smiled to himself as he filled the syringe from the glass vial.
“Tran keeps threatening me,” he said. “But at this point it hardly matters. If his people don’t want to market our drug, Greta, there’ll be a long line of others who will.”
“That’s enough, Bean. Put it down. Put it down now and turn around and go to the door.”
“You see how confident I am, Greta. I know there are two sides warring in you right now. Greta the DEA agent, and Greta the woman and mother. Should you do your duty and risk serving out your life sentence of excruciating pain, or should you put all that aside for a while and save your own flesh and blood, give your daughter back her mother. Should you destroy me, or should you be part of the medical breakthrough of our age? Those are the options, Greta, and I know you’ll agree with me. Your duty is important, yes; I know about duty. But ridding yourself of torment is far and away your more important responsibility.”
“There’s no debate going on in my head. Another fucking step and you’re dead.”
Bean smiled and took that step.
She shot him in the leg, shot him a second time in the other leg. The explosions were immense in that tiny cabin. Bean was knocked back against the door. He howled and cursed, but after only a few seconds he was back on his feet, sagging to one side but upright. Tran lay flat on his belly on the floor, low noises coming from his throat as if he were cycling through a chant.
Greta stared, her heart churning.
Bean’s pants legs were ripped just below both knees, but there was no gore, no wound of any kind. With a groan, he stooped and retrieved the syringe and held it up to the light, and made a long sigh of relief. Greta stared at his legs, her mind whirling with the crazy sight before her, splinters and wire. Two fist size gouges in the gray fabric of his pants. But no blood.
“Prosthetics,” he said, setting the syringe on the table near his bag. Then he swung his head to the side and shouted at the Asian man. “Tran, no, no, don’t do it!”
Greta jerked her aim to the left but the man in silver clothes was still on the floor. Before she could swing back to Bean, he’d lunged for the pistol and had torn it from her grip. He stepped away and held her eye.
“Now, Greta, we’ll have to wait a few minutes till your blood pressure drops back to normal.”
He set the pistol on a shelf across the cabin.
“And Tran, after you’ve pulled yourself together sufficiently, do you think you can help me tighten up these straps?”
***
There was something bad wrong with Pepper’s jaw. She could open and close her mouth, but when she tried to touch her teeth together, they didn’t mesh, and worse than that, they ached, all her teeth at once. Every single one, right down to the roots and below.
She sobbed for the first twenty miles, then got it down to a whimper by the time she made Bahia Honda and was just sniffling a little as she passed through Marathon. By the time she hit Islamorada her eyes were clear and there was a hornet buzzing in the big vein in her neck. And her teeth were throbbing worse than they had before.
She knew exactly what was wrong. Bean had broken her jaw. Which meant she would have to get her mouth wired shut for six weeks, and for that month and a half she’d have to drink all her meals, milkshakes with raw eggs, hot soup, which she hated. She wouldn’t be able to brush, no yawning, no French kissing, no hot peppers, nothing solid in her mouth at all, animal, vegetable, or human. And worse, she’d have to start carrying a pair of wire clippers in her purse everywhere she went in case she got sick. With your mouth wired shut, you didn’t want to be doing a whole lot of vomiting.
At noon, as she pulled into the gravel drive of Dr. Bean Wilson’s office, she didn’t have a single drip left in her tear ducts and she could feel the blood in her chest getting sludgy and hot. Nobody’d ever hit her before. Not even her daddy. Not even when she’d called him vile names, spit on him, tried to claw out his eyes. Not once. He’d treated her with respect and kindness even when she’d attempted to bite the end of his dick off that first time he slipped it in her mouth when she was half asleep. Ten years old and clamping down on her daddy’s meaty pecker like it was a drumstick, sinking her teeth deep into the blood of it. But not even then did he hit her. And not later, when she badmouthed him in front of his boat bum buddies. Calling him sex names she’d heard her girlfriends use on their boyfriends. Pencil dick, nutless wonder. Embarrassing him, making him angry, but even then he didn’t swat her, didn’t say an unkind word to her. Just came in later and asked her if she meant those things and she said no, not really, and that was all there was to that. He’d been Pepper’s husband from the age of ten till the year she turned twenty-one, when he died. He’d asked for her hand that first year of sex together. One night lying next to her in the dark after they’d finished, asking her if she’d rather be his daughter or his wife. She didn’t need to think that one over. His wife, she’d said, of course, his wife. And afterward he’d always been a good husband, showing her how to do things in the bedroom, how to please him and how to please herself. Three or four sexual things were all he knew to teach her. Nothing like the knowledge Pepper had acquired with other boys since her daddy died.
Her daddy was always polite, apologetic even. Born on Key West of a mean sponge-fishing father, raised with courtly conch manners and strong family discipline, her daddy would kiss her on the forehead or on the temple, but never on the lips, even when he was riding along above her groaning and sweating. He wouldn’t do that and she understood why, because even though Pepper was his wife, he treated her like a lady, because it would’ve made everything too personal, too intimate if they’d touched tongues, slobbered on each other’s faces. Even when she told her guidance counselor at school she was married to her daddy and later that night the sheriff and two of his men came to the boat and woke him up and questioned him and then questioned her too, and took her daddy away to the jail to question him some more. Even after he came back the next morning, let go for lack of evidence, he didn’t hit her. He just said he understood she was mad at him and that was all right, ‘cause from time to time women got mad at their men, it didn’t matter how good the man was to the woman, there’d just necessarily have to come that moment when she couldn’t stand the sight or smell of him and she’d get mad. From time to time it was perfectly natural that she should hate him. His only request was that when the next time came, and the terrible anger heated her blood, would she please stay away from the frying pans and the long kitchen knives. His head was still ringing, he said, from a conking Pepper’s mother had given him twenty years before.
In Dr. Bean Wilson’s parking lot there was a yellow Coupe de Ville and another car, a little black Japanese convertible parked beside it. She got out, peeked into the convertible, and saw a couple of tennis rackets and a wire basket full of Day-Glo yellow balls.
She got the key to the office door out of her pocketbook and went over to the front door. She slipped the key in the lock but the door was already open, so she pushed on inside.
There were voices coming from down the hall. Bean’s father doing a little Sunday morning consultation. Pepper drew the #15 scalpel from the pocket of her shorts. You never knew when you might have to make a quick incision. She slid through the door back to the examining rooms.
“Still nothing?” she heard the old doctor say.
Pepper’d met him twice before when he’d visited the Eaton Street clinic in the last couple of years. Nice old gentleman who smiled a lot and had good Southern manners like he thought every woman was a lady and every man a gentleman until proven otherwise.
“Numb as a hunk of roast beef,” another man replied.
Pepper edged down the hallway to the room with light coming from it.
“Jesus, Eddie, I don’t know what it is,” the old doctor said. “But there’s something wrong here. I simply don’t understand this.”
“I’ll say there’s something wrong. Christ, maybe you used the wrong stuff.”
Pepper snuck a quick look around the edge of the door. The old doctor had his drug cabinet open and was fumbling around inside it. A tall thin man with a bald head was sitting on the examining table. He wore white tennis shorts and a white T-shirt.
“I’m going to have to call for an ambulance, Eddie, get you into the hospital. I’m sorry, but I don’t see any other choice.”
“Shit, Bean, it’s just tennis elbow. What the hell’s going on? I walk in here, I’m fine. What is this, some kind of heart attack?”
“No, no. I need you to calm down, Eddie. I’ll get that ambulance down here and we’ll sort all of this out at the hospital.”
“Jesus Christ, Bean, it’s the club mixed doubles tournament. There’s going to be some very pissed-off people if I don’t show.”
“Blame me,” the old doc said. “It’s all my fault.”
Pepper ducked across the hall into a dark examining room and listened to the doctor walk back to his office and call 911. Four or five minutes later the ambulance was outside and the two of them left, Eddie still bitching about his arm.
Pepper went into the examining room where they’d been, opened the drug cabinet, and took out the four remaining vials. She was back in the hearse a minute later and on her way back to Key West.
As she drove, every few seconds she’d forget and touch her teeth together and there’d be another explosion of splintered light in the back of her brain. That bastard had broken her jaw and she wasn’t going to be right again for a long time. There wasn’t any brand of love she knew that could stand up to something like that. Pepper sure as hell wasn’t one of those women with self-esteem problems. Some brute of a husband beating the shit out of her in the morning and the woman all dressed up in her frilly things with his favorite supper on the table by evening time, greeting him at the door with a gooey hello. No, sir, she wasn’t one of those. Her daddy’d taught her about love, and though she knew the world considered their marriage perverted, at least her daddy had never once hit her, never once done anything but praise her efforts, no matter how paltry they’d been. Didn’t matter he was a child molester. Give her one of those any day instead of a bastard who broke the jaw of the woman whose only fault was loving him.
As she drove through Lower Matecumbe, Pepper minced up a hot claw on the back of a folded-up road map, then pinched the crumbly pieces into her mouth one dab at a time and sucked their juices. In no time her mouth was filled with dazzling fire, her eyes watering furiously, then the numbness began to seep into her gums and after that everything was fine for a little while.
CHAPTER 25
At noon Thorn called the offices of the Key Largo News, though he knew Monica would not be there. It was Sunday after all, day of rest. Not like the Herald up in Miami, where it took every hour of every day to cover the unceasing parade of outrages. In Key Largo you could miss a day or two, nobody’d notice, maybe a month. He was just going to leave a message on the answering machine, ask Monica to call him first thing on Monday. Then maybe slip in another discreet sentence or two, tell her he loved her, say he was sorry for how he’d acted last week, pushing her away like he’d done, leave it at that for the time being.
He was getting the words right in his head when the phone snapped up on the first ring and a man barked an impatient hello. When Thorn hesitated, the man snarled hello again.
“Is Monica there?”
“Who is this?”
“Who is this?” Thorn said back to him.
“Monica’s not here.”
“I want to leave a message for her.”
“Who is this?” the man repeated. Thorn was forming a picture of the guy. A square head with tiny ears and small weak eyes. A phone bully—all those safe miles of cable between them.
“My name is Thorn.”
The guy took a three-or four-second break to think that over. “You’re the boyfriend.”
“That’s right. The boyfriend.”
“Well, she’s not coming into the office today.”
“I know. I just want to get a message to her. I want her to call me.
“So you heard about what happened?”
Thorn didn’t like his tone. Ominous and gloating.
“No,” Thorn said. “Why don’t you tell me.”
“Three dead. Two by gunshot, one with her throat slashed.”
Thorn lost the air in his lungs.
“They did Roy Everly execution style, two bullets through the temple, and his mother had her throat cut, then some old woman across the street was shot in the face.”
“And Monica!”
“She got grazed on her neck. No big deal. Innocent bystander.”
Thorn gripped the phone harder.
“No big deal,” Thorn said.
“That’s right.”
“You ever been grazed by a bullet?”
“Fuck you, Jack. I don’t have time for this.”
“Where’s Monica now?”
“Home, I think. Or over at your place. She had to bury the pooch.”
“What?”
“Her dog. It got shot too. Lots of bullets flying.”
Thorn closed his eyes. Worked on his breathing for a few seconds.
“Listen,” Thorn said. “Whatever the fuck your name is. Get your self-important ass up right now, and drive over there and tell her to call me.”
“Can’t do it, lover boy. Herald’s bringing me on board to do some interviewing on this. I don’t have time to be running messages. This is my shot.”
“You’re going to go over there,” Thorn said. “And you’re going to tell Monica to call me.”
“Wrong,” the guy said, and hung up.
Thorn stared at the dead phone in his hand. He was losing it. Couldn’t even intimidate a guy over the phone—like the asshole knew Thorn was crippled, stuck in an aluminum chair, his threats without weight.
He dialed the Key Largo sheriff’s department, worked his way past the receptionist to Jennifer Bell, head cheerleader back in Thorn’s football days. Pert and blond and full of serious pep. Captain Bell now. No-nonsense Captain Bell. Her school devotion had turned civic.
“She’s fine, Thorn. We talked to her a good part of the night. Upset, of course, discombobulated, but okay. She’s probably sleeping it off now.”
“Is anybody watching her?”
“What? You mean like protecting her?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“This wasn’t about her, Thorn. She was just an eyewitness to the event and got herself between the shooters and their escape vehicle and they took a couple of potshots at her. That’s the way we read it.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“If we thought she was in the least danger, there’d be somebody over there, Thorn. Believe it.”
“Can you get a message to her, Jen? I need to talk to her.”
“When I get a minute, yeah, I’ll send someone over. It’s kind of crazy around here at the moment. Three dead, that’s a year’s worth for us. But I’ll send somebody when I can. Okay?”
It wasn’t okay, but it was the best he could arrange so far from home with Sugarman off on vacation.
All afternoon he waited for the phone to ring, exercising in the rehab room, doing dips on the parallel bars, and working his useless legs. As the hours drifted by, he felt the anger swelling at the bottom of his gut like a tumor that seemed to double in mass with every breath.
The clinic’s phone was silent all afternoon, and after his workout, a long shower didn’t cool him down, and the rum and Coke he accepted from Ginny only gave his frustration a brittle edge. At six o’clock he made himself a grilled cheese sandwich and a simple salad from the paltry supplies in the kitchen, and a while later he submitted to his second steroid injection of the day at the hands of Nurse Jankowitz, a humorless woman with an impenetrable Slavic accent who untaped the adhesive strip that covered the catheter tip at the base of his spine, flooded his spinal cord with the useless steroids, then retaped the spout, all with the soft-handed tenderness of a meat packer.
Back in his airless room, Thorn sat and stared at the bleak wall, watching the daylight die. He was trapped in someone else’s failed body. The ice in his legs had rooted itself deep in his marrow, and again and again as he tried to work a single toe, tilt his ankle, pass even the faintest signal to the dark mass of his legs, nothing made it through. Tipping up his foot a quarter of an inch was as far beyond his abilities as levitating a granite boulder. His mind throbbed from the effort, and the anger snapped through his veins like the tattered claws of flame.
